Edge Computing: Move over ‘Cloud’

Peter Levin, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, talks about a very interesting theory about Edge computing. He states that Edge computing is going to be the next big revolution in the computing space and cloud computing is going to take a back seat in this arena.

Levin says that being an investor, he has to be able to read the industry signs correctly and take a call on where the industry is headed before it actually does. This is the reason why he believes that the industry is going to move into process computing at a device level from the present cloud based services.

He gives very apt insights into what makes him think so; drones, autonomous cars, and future robots will be requiring extremely precise and rapid computing power and the time it takes for data to be relayed to and from the cloud based system in place now will just be too slow.

Not Just Levin

It's not just Peter Levin who thinks that cloud computing is set to take a back seat, there are other firms too that are noticing this change about to happen. All this does give us a sense of deja-vu, considering it took a very good portion of the last decade for the industry to warm up to the idea of cloud computing.

Danielle Merfeld, VP General Electric Global Research to thinks on the same lines. She says that her company is facing and will also in the future face a similar situation. GE manufactures huge machines such as locomotives, generators and gas turbines. These machines, when possess embedded sensors, generate a humongous amount of information that needs to be processed real time. The sensors process the information on the machine and back up only the most valuable data for machine learning.

Even Deepu Tala, VP & GM Nvidia shares similar ideologies on the topic. His company, which is involved in the manufacture of GPU chips which are in turn the bedrock on which AI and robotics tech is being fuelled, says that the reasons for moving to the edge will be many but it will start with the need for speed and practicality.

The Miles Ahead

Cloud technology will still be here to stay even in the future even though AWS and Microsoft have both lined up products aimed towards the edge computing market in AWS Greengrass and Azure Stack. It's just a matter of time before we see other players too entering the field trying to supplement cloud computing services with edge computing.

IBM is still manufacturing mainframes in a world of cloud computing. This is what makes us say that cloud will still be very relevant in the computing ecosystem. It will, however, play a very dramatically different role of processing data for machine learning processes or even acting as an adjunct to the more pressing data processing needs as compared to the present time where it rules the roost.